Science & Industry

After reading the devblog about the bans against botters and watching the price of trit climb (whether that's speculative trading or not), I was thinking about a way to make things better from a game mechanic perspective so botting is less attractive. As an industrialist in 0.0, one of the major pains is getting enough low-end minerals to keep up with build demands, which typically means hauling it from empire to the build area. Botters get to sit in the "safer" high-sec and mine the low ends which is then consumed not only by other high-sec players but also low-sec exporters. Removing the latter buyers puts a big squeeze on the botter's market, and maybe it no longer makes sense for them to continue doing it. So how do we get low-end minerals in null without reversing the problem.

My idea is to bring together a few existing game mechanics for a new type of 0.0 mineral acquisition - I'll call it "Rogue Asteroids".

First of all, all low-end minerals are removed from 0.0. This ensures that we don't simply inject new minerals, but take away the old source to keep things simpler to balance.

Secondly, ORE invents a new frigate-class ship, a variation on the stealth bombers. This ship will be small, fast, and have the capability to use probes and a new special ORE bomb launcher.

Finally, we introduce the "rogue asteroid". Similar to existing anomalies, these asteroids are scanned down by the ORE frigates. However, this is not a scan down, bookmark, and send in the hulks scenario, because the rogue asteroid will be moving, and at a high enough clip that barges can't keep up. So, the ORE frigate scans it down, has enough time to get on grid with the asteroid before it flies away, and sets up following it. At this point, the bomb launcher comes into play, and we get into some destructive mining. This ship launches "mining charge" bombs at the moving asteroid, blowing huge chunks of the asteroid off. These chunks take on the form similar to a wreck, and are basically stationary. They can be bookmarked, target broadcast, etc etc, and at this point haulers sweep in and loot the chunks, which are huge - 25km3 a pop or something of that magnitude.

The ORE ship keeps bombing the asteroid until it is demolished, the haulers loot all the chunks, they are taken back to a refinery and refined into whatever that rogue asteroid was. The kicker here is that we're talking a massive amount of trit, enough such that a 0.0 alliance who is on the ball and probing out rogue asteroids regularly is not wanting for low end minerals, but recall that this also becomes their only local source of low-ends, and you can balance the mineral income by tweaking how often these will appear.

My primary philosophy here is that I think everyone in 0.0 would like to be spending time doing something other than dealing with gathering low-end minerals. If you make it a very big reward, but spread those individual rewards out over a period of time (say, you get one trit asteroid every few days, and you need to catch it within some sort of timeframe before it despawns and you're SOL until the next one comes along) such that you don't entirely imbalance the market, I think it could work. This means that rather than miners wishing they could scoop their eyeballs out because they're mining veld in 0.0, or having to run a whole ancillary empire operation to do mineral mining/purchasing/compression and then dealing with the poor JF pilot who is freighting the same junk over and over and over again just to get trit, they can be spending time doing something more productive, like losing ships in battle.

A quick rebuttal to any plan to increase low-end mins in 0.0 is going to be "They'll just get shipped to high-sec", which is where I respond with the beauty of attaining these minerals in a unique fashion. You can pull the reverse of rorqual ore compression on this stuff, and once it is refined call it "low-grade tritanium" or something along those lines, where one unit behaves exactly the same in a blueprint as regular tritanium, but instead of the tiny 0.01m3 per unit, it will be 5m3 per unit or something like that. An additional bonus would be not seeding the market with the low-grade entries such that any that did make its way back to empire would need to be sold through contracts, not the ease of the market.

It's really late, I'm not sure this was coherent, but the idea was percolating and getting to sleep without throwing it out there wasn't working so well, so tell me what you think. Have I missed a gaping issue with this kind of setup?

ETA: I probably posted this in the wrong forum due to aforementioned lateness. If this needs to move to idea discussions, please do so.

This is really the crux of my point (and the increasing of time/effort in your third point is counteractive to it) - adjusting the opportunity cost of obtaining low-end minerals for 0.0 industry. If it only takes 30 minutes to an hour to complete the process of scanning down, blowing up, and collecting all the chunks, but you can only do it once a day or every few days, then you don't flood the market or ruin high sec, but you also provide time for actual players to do stuff with more reasonable opportunity costs associated with them, such as mining ABCs, doing actual ship production rather than dealing with the logistics of trit compression and shipment from empire, or going out on pvp ops and losing more ships because there are more ships to be had.

Industry in 0.0 is one thing that needs a buff - it is very difficult to justify building something in 0.0, and when you're forced to (ie: capitals) dealing with the massive amounts of trit required is onerous.

I understand that CCP is tracking bots, I'm trying another tack - removing/reducing their market. Again, if it becomes feasible for 0.0 industrialists to collect what they need from 0.0, without in turn them flooding the highsec market with their low end mins, then you have taken a large bite out of the high-sec trit market where the botters live.

You make some valid points, and I'm not sure there are good answers for all of them, but for the above it's pretty straightforward. Have a POS module called a "Rogue Asteroid Detection Grid" or something that throws a notification to corp when the asteroid is in the system. Someone will have to be online to catch it, but if you give a long enough window, it won't be onerous. Again, this will require corps to make an investment in being in 0.0, having to setup a POS and fuel it to get their guaranteed notification of the rogue asteroid.

My personal issue with a mining mini-game is that it's going to make it so that what was formerly a low intensity activity a high intensity one, and therefor you need to adjust the rewards accordingly. If I have to be paying 100% attention to the minigame, what's going to stop me from giving up on mining with a bunch of characters (because you can't) to running anomalies on 1 - 2 characters and making the same or more money. This is the scenario today, in that anomalies are typically worth more isk per hour per character than any mining. So if you look at it from a pure profit standpoint, a mini-game to mining will kill its profitability which means less people mining, and taking 0.0 industry in the wrong direction.

I'm not saying a mini-game isn't going to work, and it certainly has potential to solve the botting problem (not guaranteed, improvements in computer learning every day), but as I mentioned above, I'm looking at this as more of a solution to solve 0.0 low-end mineral shortages, with the potential windfall of drastically reducing the high-sec demand for these minerals and therefor reducing the market for the botters.